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Technology
This article summarizes information from the Mecha Galaxy "Lore" and "Mechs" screens (under the Home and Buy tabs, respectively), and from the "Official Lore" posts on Galaxy Gathering. Niodes and Their Uses Mecha Galaxy ''has no pretensions to "hard sci-fi", so its technological landscape is densely populated with devices that break the laws of physics. The most fundamental of these devices is the niode, named for the niobium used to make it. Niodes can do any number of miraculous things, from storing infinite energy to activating wormholes -- known in-game as "Gateways" -- but they must be directly manipulated by the mind of a sentient being. Only one in a hundred people has the psychological characteristics necessary to use niodes, and they generally do this through an interface device called a "neural rig" or "neural link". Most vehicles in the Fourth Millenium are powered with niodes, and are designed in a roughly humanoid shape, to make them more rig-compatible. These vehicles are called either "Mecha" (as both singular and plural) or "Mechs" (singular: "Mech"); a "typical Mecha" is between 6 and 10 meters tall¹, and none are taller than 15 meters², since Mecha of that size could not fit through a Gateway. Specialized cargo containers can also move through a Gateway; these "shipping cubes" have a simple niode matrix embedded in their walls. Computing In ''Mecha Galaxy, silicon microchips have been obsolete for many centuries, replaced with organically-grown fiberoptic computers called "neuroptics" or "bioptics". The bioptic computer aboard a Mecha is programmed with a limited A.I., on the scale of a border collie or a rhesus monkey, which can recognize its owner and learn from its victories. There are also human-sized androids called "drones", which have slightly more advanced A.I., just barely sentient enough to control niodes. Drones are used to replace human Mecha pilots, but they are only suitable for simple tasks like guarding military compounds: one of the Mission 5 mini-bosses is a drone called "Alpha-1". One of the encounters in Mission 4 involves a "new model of automated combat mech" which the player destroys for going amok. Finally, the entity known as A.M. is an A.I. of human -- or perhaps even superhuman -- intelligence, although it is the only one of its kind. Microscopic robots called "nanites" are frequently incorporated into machines -- including Mecha equipment -- typically for repair and maintenance. Nanites are probably too small to use bioptics, although it is unclear what the alternative could be. Advanced Materials Mecha built for combat -- or re-purposed for combat, like the Freon-class heavy Mecha -- are supported by a "ferrite" or "ferronite" skeleton: the name Mecha Galaxy's developers gave to an iron-silicon alloy with a nanocrystalline structure, invented in 1988 by Japanese researchers Yoshizawa, Oguma, and Yamauchi. Diamond nanorods are apparently used for industrial equipment. Power Like batteries and fuel cells, niodes can only store energy: the power used to recharge a niode has to be generated by some other source. Presumably, a player's base contains some kind of power plant. An upgraded Mecha can also have one or more engines which supplement the power from its niodes. Engines range from internal combustion designs, like the Wankel rotary engine, to small nuclear reactors, which use either fission or fusion depending on which model the player selects. While these engines need regular re-fueling (something else which is presumably left to the player's support crew), they provide significant bursts of power during combat. ---- ¹ 20 feet and 33 feet. ² 49 feet. Category:Lore